bottleneck from development to somewhere else down the line.” For example,
the sales and marketing teams might need more time to prepare for product
launch, or the legal team might have issues with features that could have been
;agged earlier in the process.

For agile to realize its full potential, Mr. Moores says, portfolio managers and
project management o;ce leaders have a tough target: company-wide buy-in. “;e
biggest challenge to agile’s maturity is getting the company to be truly agile and to
embrace agile,” he says. “How do you get legal teams, your sales teams, your account
management teams, even your testing and release teams to understand agile? I think
it comes from executive buy-in about the risks and buy-in about having detailed
planning for perhaps only the next six months and uncertainty around strategy
beyond that. Organization-wide adoption is easier said than done.”

BEYOND EITHER/OR

Some experts say it’s time for a new iteration in thinking about how agileapproaches relate to waterfall. ;e ;rst step is a mindset shift away from thinkingthat pure agile is somehow more ideal than a hybrid or customized approach, saysapproach should be to embrace change: to beaware of changes to the product under develop-ment, the needs and wishes of the users, thecompetition, the market and the technology. To“inspect and adapt” by using feedback to changeour methods and ourselves.

But our methods themselves haven’t been very
agile at all. Teams often adopt good practices
poorly and have little guidance on how to explore
new approaches beyond the oxymoronic “agile
canon” that might work better.

We need to go back to basics. We must end ouraddiction to long-term, plan-based fortune-telling,Agile means responding to sudden change quicklyand e;ectively.

While working software is our ultimate deliverable, it can’t be at the expense of a functional team
and organization. ;e software, the team, the users
and project sponsors all form one system. We need
to make sure the whole system works, for all participants. ;at’s the future of agile.

Andy Hunt is
a writer and
publisher. A former
software programmer, he’s the author
of nine books and
the co-founder
of the Pragmatic
Bookshelf, which
publishes award-winning and
critically acclaimed
books for soft ware
developers.

“Agile [can be] a refuge for mediocrepractitioners who are unable to documentor express their requirements or forecastwhat they want to build.”